Chapter 2 - Relativism, King of All

Summary

This chapter surveys the evidence for the sophistic debate on relativism as evident in the fragments of the sophists, including comic and tragic poets. A widespread interpretation of the Histories claims that Herodotus supports nomos without qualification. By contrast, this chapter argues that this claim fails to capture the complexity of Herodotus’ engagement with those figures who use nomos as a rhetorical ploy to justify what is contrary to popular ethics. Similarly, Presocratic thinkers were working through the challenges presented by those who identified nomos as only a relative set of values as opposed to an objective norm to be followed. The Histories’ exploration of the problem of relating custom and law to justice takes place in the context of the rise and expansion of Persian imperialism. Further, it implicates the despot in a relativizing of justice and constitutes a key explanatory paradigm in the Persian attack against the Greek mainland in the Greco-Persian Wars.

Herodotus’ exploration of diverse human populations and their equally wide-ranging nomoi (νόμοι) contributed to one of the most significant debates in fifth-century intellectual culture – on relativism and its implications for traditional ethical norms.¹ Indeed, as we shall see in Chapter 7, already in the fourth-century Dissoi Logoi, the Histories was being read and engaged with as an influential text on the subject. It is for this reason unsurprising that there has been much important work on “custom,” “tradition,” and “law” in the context of Ionian ethnography and the ethnographic excurses in the Histories.² These passages serve a circumscribed but crucial diegetic function: in giving pause to the diachronic narrative progression, nomoi draw a relatively static portrait of a given society, often in relation to its confrontation with the imperial power of Persia.

The etymological roots of nom- terms in νέμω (nemo), “to allot, dispense, distribute,” have been used to argue for early associations with distribution and lawfulness.³ Ancient authors may have made the connection as well; there is evidence for polyptoton in the collocation of νόμος and νέμω. The juxtaposition made could be contrastive – Theognis complains to Cyrnus that the new inhabitants of the polis were those who formerly “knew neither justice nor laws” (1.54 Young: οὔτε δίκας ᾔδεσαν οὔτε νόμους), since they used to “pasture” (1.56: ἐνέμοντο) in the fields like deer.⁴ However, in Aeschylus’ Suppliants, the chorus of Egyptian women wish for the good government (670: εὖ νέμοιτο) of the city of Athens in return for the people’s honoring of Zeus, who sets fate right with law (673: νόμῳ). In the pseudo-Platonic Minos, Socrates plays upon the associations of νομεύς, νέμω, and νόμος (317d–18a). There is one instance in which νέμω and νόμος are related in the Histories, when Herodotus finds that for the Egyptians and the Persians alike the burning of the dead is contrary to custom (3.16.3: οὐδαμῶς ἐν νόμῳ); regarding the Persians, they do not even “allot” (νέμειν) corpses to gods. In these instances, it is unclear the extent to which the figura etymologica was activated by the audience, but since it is not prominent in the Histories, the following analysis will focus upon nomos alone.

Beyond etymology, conceptualizing nomos has long exercised the energies of scholars. In an authoritative study, Martin Ostwald argued that “νόμος in all its uses describes an order of some kind, which differs from other words for ‘order,’ such as τάξις, in connotation that this order is or ought to be regarded as valid and binding by those who live under it … the crucial point is that, regardless of origin, it is recognized and acknowledged as the valid norm within a given milieu.”⁵ This captures well the implicit deontic potential of the term. Writing specifically on Herodotus, James Redfield observes:

Nomos means something more explicit than ethea, something more definite as command or prohibition. Very often a nomos is a written law (and that may be the original meaning of the word); when used for a custom it means something which can be put into words and stated as a rule. Nomoi are specifically human; the word has no relevance to animals. Furthermore, nomoi are the sign of a certain level of culture; every people has its ethea, but the most savage people have no nomoi at all … they are incapable of stating rules for themselves.

(1985), 98–9

The contrast of nomos with ethea, “customs” or “manners,” signals that nomos is distinct in its imposition of obligation and its reference to a culturally advanced set of behaviors.⁶ In the Histories, the Androphagoi have savage ethea, as practitioners of cannibalism, but observe no nomos (4.106).⁷ Nomos can be written or unwritten; it can be interpreted variously as “custom,” “tradition,” or “law.” To capture this polyvalence, it is simplest to transliterate nomos – and the synonyms nomima and nomaia – with the understanding that it can refer to each of these definitions.⁸

Herodotus’ interest in including foreign nomoi appears to have its roots in epic as well as in geographical prose literature. This earlier fictional and factual mapping of the world has left little to clarify the histor’s use of nomos as an index of ethnographic research.⁹ Nonetheless, there are suggestive hints. We are told that Charon of Lampsacus, a near contemporary of Herodotus, composed a Cretan Histories in three books, which included a discussion of the nomoi of Minos.¹⁰ Hecataeus of Miletus’ oeuvre included ethnographic excurses close to those found in the Histories, commenting on local geography, flora, fauna, and cultural practices. Tantalizingly, Plato’s Hippias boasts that his epideictic Trojan Speech included a demonstration of πάμπολλα νόμιμα καὶ πάγκαλα, “manifold and quite seemly nomima.”¹¹ Were Herodotus’ predecessors extant in this field, they would likely have provided rich information on nomos interpreted as a traditional rite, custom, usage, pertaining to clothing, diet, religion, medicine, language, and marriage practices.¹² Even in their absence, Herodotean scholars have plowed a deep furrow discussing Herodotus’ attitude to foreign cultures.

Much less prominent are studies considering Herodotus’ relation to the contemporary philosophical marketplace of ideas. This is all the more surprising given the prominence of the debate on relativism in philosophical circles. As Dihle notes: “Reflection on the nature, impact, and differences of nomoi was, as the scanty remains prove, also the subject of contemporary philosophy.”¹³ Diogenes Laertius preserves a provocative notice on the mid fifth-century philosopher, Archelaus. According to this admittedly late report, the teacher of Socrates philosophized on nomoi, both the fine and the just, and attributed ethical concepts to the field of nomos in its familiar opposition to physis: “for he philosophized about the laws, both the noble and the just;” “that justice and shamefulness are not by nature, but by convention” (DK 60 A 1: καὶ γὰρ περὶ νόμων πεφιλοσόφηκεν καὶ καλῶν καὶ δικαίων; A 2: καὶ τὸ δίκαιον εἶναι καὶ τὸ αἰσχρὸν οὐ φύσει, ἀλλὰ νόμῳ).¹⁴ The decoupling of ethical values from objective reality and their placement in the realm of nomos, “convention,” has serious implications for custom, tradition, and law. If this testimonium preserves accurate information, Archelaus is among the first to draw attention to this opposition. It is difficult, however, to put too much weight on the late report, and so we should remain agnostic as to his influence on philosophy and nomos.¹⁵

Firmer ground emerges with the historical Protagoras, who famously enunciated a relativistic thesis in his seminal Truth, or, The Overthrowing Arguments.¹⁶ Its incipit survives as follows: “Of all things the measure is man, of those that are (the case), that/how they are (the case), and of those that are not (the case), that/how they are not (the case)” (πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἐστὶν ἄνθρωπος, τῶν μὲν ὄντων ὡς ἔστιν, τῶν δὲ οὐκ ὄντων ὡς οὐκ ἔστιν).¹⁷ While nearly every word in this fragment is debated, the main outlines are accepted, namely, that the philosopher advances a form of relativism compatible with human perception and judgment. Though we have lost the treatise, Protagoras’ man-measure doctrine was, fortunately, the beneficiary of serious and sustained philosophical interest, at least by the fourth century. Its implications for nomos will become clear from a brief look at Plato’s construal of Protagoras.

Plato’s relatively uncontroversial interpretation of the doctrine takes the following form: “doesn’t he say something about like this, as things seem to me so they are to me, and as things seem to you, so they are to you – and you and I are ‘man’?”¹⁸ Protagoras expounds a form of subjective relativism, whereby whatever an individual perceives is infallibly correct.¹⁹ In this form of relativism, differing individuals can apply opposing predicates to what is apparently the same subject without inconsistency. If honey is sweet to me, but bitter for you, these are equally true predicates for us both.²⁰ However, in addition to this position, in the Theaetetus, “Protagoras” equally stakes out a claim for what has been called “social” relativism. Reflections on the individual transition into a discussion of the behavior of communities. Socrates gives voice to Protagoras’ position as follows:²¹

οὐκοῦν καὶ περὶ πολιτικῶν, καλὰ μὲν καὶ αἰσχρὰ καὶ δίκαια καὶ ἄδικα καὶ ὅσια καὶ μή, οἷα ἂν ἑκάστη πόλις οἰηθεῖσα θῆται νόμιμα αὑτῇ, ταῦτα καὶ εἶναι τῇ ἀληθείᾳ ἑκάστῃ, καὶ ἐν τούτοις μὲν οὐδὲν σοφώτερον οὔτε ἰδιώτην ἰδιώτου οὔτε πόλιν πόλεως εἶναι.

(Tht. 172a)

And also, as concerns public affairs, the noble and the shameful, the just and the unjust, the holy and the unholy, whatever each polis conceives and lays down as nomima for itself, these are also the truth in each polis, and in these things no individual is wiser than any other nor is polis wiser than polis.

According to Plato, Protagoras holds that whatever the normative moral code of a polis, it is an outgrowth of a unique society rather than the result of an objective governing order. It is easy to underestimate the radical nature of this thesis, but cultural relativism does more than acknowledge that differing societies engage in differing practices, it entails the proposition that the traditional practices of a given society are ethical for it, however disturbing they may be from an etic perspective.

It is clear that this argument made an impact on Plato’s Socrates as well. In the Crito, Socrates defends himself to Crito for remaining in Athens and suffering the death penalty instead of escaping the polis as a fugitive. To convince his interlocutor of the correctness of his decision, Socrates apostrophizes Athens’ nomoi. In their imaginary dialogue with him, the laws point to the hypocrisy of Socrates’ benefiting from the city all of his life but then not adhering to their justice system. They offer an analogy according to which, like a father, the laws of the city are not on an equal footing with those who observe them and instead require total obedience. Just as a father can strike his son and not be struck – an example of a nomos that was by then proverbial, as we shall see – to an even greater degree the polis merits the respect of its citizenry if it strikes them down (50e–1c).²² Even if the laws mandate what is unjust, as in their decree of death for Socrates, they are no less binding.

In discussions of cultural relativism, the network of nom- terms serves as a given society’s expression of its own ethical norms, its own justice.²³ Its contingency was voiced by the fourth-century sophist, Lycophron, in his remark that nomos is “a guarantor of justice to one another” (Arist. Pol. 1280b) but one that held no power to make citizens noble and just. The coincidence of a society’s conventions, laws, and customs, on the one hand, and its ethics, on the other, has the potential for volatility in particular in the innovation of nomoi or in using the language of habitual unjust behavior as nomos. In such instances, a tension between popular justice and nomos emerges, one that calls into question their identity. Given the exiguous remains of the Presocratic philosophers on the subject, it is necessary to turn to another avenue of intellectual culture, in Athenian drama, to assess its impact.²⁴

As a comedy inspired by the “New Learning” revolutionizing science, rhetoric, and ethics, Aristophanes’ Clouds presents uniquely important evidence of the ethical implications of subjective and cultural relativism. In the comedy, an Athenian father, Strepsiades, works to enroll his son, Pheidippides, in Socrates’ philosophical school, “The Thinkery.” Pheidippides commences his education with the arrival of two logoi, the Better and the Worse, which engage in a spirited rhetorical contest to persuade the new pupil of the necessity of adopting their respective methods. It is noteworthy that when the Worse logos starts his pitch, in his very first words he stresses his impact on tradition by revealing that he is called the Worse logos by the intellectuals “because first of all I contrived to speak what is the opposite of our nomoi and opposite to what is just” (1039–40: ὅτι πρώτιστος ἐπενόησα τοῖσιν νόμοις καὶ ταῖς δίκαις τἀναντί’ ἀντιλέξαι).

The structure of the antilogy between the Better and Worse logos conjures up Protagoras’ much vaunted declaration that there were “two logoi opposed to one another on every matter” (DK 80 A 1). But the comedy undermines the interpretation of the claim that Protagoras appears to have made, namely, that these arguments should equally obtain. In the Clouds, the Worse logos is compromised from its very inception, although it does in the end “win” the debate against its opponent.²⁵ In any case, the allusion to Protagorean philosophy continues in the reference to the disturbance of nomos. Protagoras’ position on the equal validity of differing nomoi in human societies was deployed by the Clouds to challenge the internal validity of a polis’ customs and its sense of justice. After Pheidippides graduates from the Thinkery, he offers a dramatic example of the disturbing outcomes that can emerge from this philosophy of relativism.

Following his return home, Strepsiades requests that his newly minted sophos sing something from the great Simonides or Aeschylus. Pheidippides at first rejects his father’s promptings and finally consents to sing something avant-garde, something from Euripides. He sings a tune in which a young man sleeps with his sister – a theme that his father unsurprisingly finds depraved. The argument that follows matures into a violent altercation, and Strepsiades complains after he is beaten by his son, “Nowhere is it customary for a father to suffer this (1420: ἀλλ’ οὐδαμοῦ νομίζεται τὸν πατέρα τοῦτο πάσχειν)!” Yet Pheidippides, fresh from the Thinkery, is now equipped with a rhetorical arsenal to combat any opponent and uses this opportunity to display his skills and to justify his abuse of traditional norms.²⁶ Though we must remain sensitive to the generic deformation of philosophy in Old Comedy, it is clear that the humor from the scenario derives from its lampooning popular sophistic discourse.

The agon sophias begins with Pheidippides’ picking up the thread on nomos: “Was it not a man like you and I who established this nomos first, and persuaded the ancients with his speech?”²⁷ Historicizing nomos as a human innovation rather than a divine one puts tension on its ethical mandate and exposes its arbitrary nature.²⁸ If persuasion of the masses is the measure of ethical norms, then it stands to reason that an individual in the present, such as Pheidippides, might reshape nomos with a more persuasive account of human action. The nature of his defense shifts to deflate his father’s grievance against him by introducing a nomos allowing sons to beat their fathers. Pheidippides bolsters his legislation with the statement that a law that is of recent provenance is not thereby worse, ἧττόν τι δῆτ’ ἔξεστι κἀμοὶ καινὸν αὖ τὸ λοιπὸν | θεῖναι νόμον τοῖς υἱέσιν, τοὺς πατέρας ἀντιτύπτειν.²⁹ The Clouds trades precisely on the fact that nomos is not hinged upon any objective standard but instead is subject to alteration and thus potentially a threat to popular conceptions of justice.³⁰ Pheidippides’ sophistic legerdemain reveals the problematic status of nomos as an ethical determinant – if nothing objective underlies convention beyond the passage of time, then moral behavior can be interpreted as fluid.

As has been noted by others, Pheidippides’ song contains a provocative intertext – one that is of particular interest for our purposes.³¹ The comic moment in which Pheidippides is said to sing a salacious Euripidean ballad on sibling incest, ὡς ἐκίνει | ἁδελφός, ὦ ‘λεξίκακε, τὴν ὁμομητρίαν ἀδελφήν (1371–2: “how a brother was screwing, god help me, his sister born from the same mother”), likely refers to Euripides’ Aeolus. This fragmentary tragedy centered on another father-son debate, in this case, on the (im)morality of incest.³² The young Macareus had secretly impregnated his maternal sister and needed to persuade his father, Aeolus, of the rectitude of marrying his sons to his daughters. In fact, Macareus does convince him to accept incestuous marriage.³³ The tragedy famously contained the line, “what is shameful, if it does not seem so to those practicing it (τί δ’ αἰσχρὸν ἢν μὴ τοῖσι χρωμένοις δοκῇ;)?”³⁴ As E. R. Dodds notes: “The line understandably created a scandal. It shows just where ethical relativism lands you.”³⁵ Moral norms are under threat, in this case through the language of “use.” It is by interweaving this paratragic moment into the Clouds that Aristophanes reveals the extent to which morality is subject to revision. It can even be pressed into support for incest. Macareus and Pheidippides both illustrate the drama that results from an awareness of the relativism of cultural practices and the ability to deform traditional morality by the abuse of this realization.³⁶

Euripides’ Phoenissae is equally sensitive to the pressure on traditional ethics from the influence of relativism. A particularly lucid evocation of this occurs in the context of Eteocles’ bid for sole power in Thebes. He forestalls his brother Polyneices’ claims of unjust treatment and impiety by calling attention to the instability of reference regarding the terms kalos and sophos: “if to all the same thing were by nature noble and wise, there would be no strife talking out of both sides of its mouth among humans: but as it is nothing is similar or equal for mortals except for names – but this is not the thing itself” (εἰ πᾶσι ταὐτὸν καλὸν ἔφυ σοφόν θ᾽ ἅμα | οὐκ ἦν ἂν ἀμφίλεκτος ἀνθρώποις ἔρις | νῦν δ᾽ οὔθ᾽ ὅμοιον οὐδὲν οὔτ᾽ ἴσον βροτοῖς | πλὴν ὀνόμασιν: τὸ δ᾽ ἔργον οὐκ ἔστιν τόδε).³⁷ The double-tongued ἀμφίλεκτος is evocative of Protagoras’ own professed ability to discuss any subject from a weaker or a stronger position, and it is clear that Eteocles’ pronouncement is suggestive of the disturbing ends to which Protagoras’ relativism is the means.³⁸ While Eteocles does not here use the language of nomos, this passage remains an important witness to the realization that ethical predicates can have varied but equally valid subjects. For Eteocles, this ultimately authorizes the pursuit of tyranny.³⁹

As we have seen, fifth-century intellectual culture reveals a preoccupation with relativism. But while there is, at times, a comprehension of the validity of the diversity of human nomoi, relativism is also made to undermine traditional moral dictates against depravity, such as mandates against incest, the abuse of parents, and tyranny. This occurs through the metaethical reflection that cultural norms differ while being equally authoritative, which leads to a rejection of absolutist or objective standards of human action. The corrosion of moral intuitions occurs in each instance through the agency of the individual. Pheidippides, Macareus, and Eteocles each challenge the predominant consensus. Unique to Pheidippides is the explicitness of the impact of this corrosion on the social fabric, as he underscores the all-too-human roots of nomos in an individual’s ability to persuade others. Evidently, the audience is meant to find such subversion menacing. In light of this, it is telling that even as late as Plato’s Laws, the Athenian Stranger is made to praise an obscure and otherwise unknown law according to which no youth could (a) query the rightness or wrongness of the laws and in fact (b) had to affirm them all divine.⁴⁰

The Nomological Marketplace: Nomos and Relativism in the Histories

Turning to the Histories, it has long been recognized that nomos and its cognates play a key role: they embrace a wide variety of behaviors and organize human societies into predictable macro-historical agents; similarly, they create identities and polarities both between Greek city-states and between Greece and foreign peoples.⁴¹ Additionally, they tell a diachronic story. Nomoi introduce a hermeneutic stance promoting cultural relativism whereby all cultural practices are equal.

Yet, whether or not the Histories is engaged in promoting cultural relativism has become a much-debated question. An increasingly prominent position argues that the text does not advance a position of relativism.⁴² As an example, Tim Rood holds that “Herodotus’ argument about Cambyses’ madness does not show that he was a strict cultural relativist. He does not claim that all customs are equally valid, but rather that recognition that one’s own perspective on others’ customs is culturally determined should lead to tolerance.”⁴³ This position can be addressed if we turn to what is perhaps the most famous passage on cultural relativism in the Histories, at the end of the “Madness of Cambyses” logos.⁴⁴

Nomoi in the Histories have up to this point represented the set of social behaviors that constitute a given group’s ethical framework, a feature of humans that separates them from the animal world.⁴⁵ The reign of the Persian king Cambyses in many respects encapsulates the entire problem of Persian kingship, and it is thus of great interest that it is continuously presented as an attack on nomos.⁴⁶ After his successful conquest of Egypt, Cambyses shifts to an internal war against his Persian and Egyptian subjects and in the process continuously violates the traditions and laws of both peoples.⁴⁷ The narrative foregrounds a series of attacks against the king’s family, wise advisor, Persian agemates, and finally, his court attendants. These increasingly erratic and under-motivated offenses eventually result in the narrator’s diagnosis: “in many such ways he raged against the Persians and the allies” (3.37.1: ὁ μὲν δὴ τοιαῦτα πολλὰ ἐς Πέρσας τε καὶ τοὺς συμμάχους ἐξεμαίνετο).⁴⁸ The logos continues with an enumeration of the religious impieties the tyrant commits against the Egyptians, which fills out the statement that Cambyses attacked both Persians and their “allies,” the Egyptians. Herodotus concludes:

In every way, then, there are clear indications for me that Cambyses was totally insane. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have attempted to mock things sacred and customary (ἱροῖσί τε καὶ νομαίοισι). For if someone were to put a proposition before all men, ordering them to select the noblest nomoi for themselves from all nomoi (νόμους τοὺς καλλίστους ἐκ τῶν πάντων νόμων), after examining them thoroughly each people would choose those of their own. So, each people observes that by far the noblest are their own nomoi (οὕτω νομίζουσι πολλόν τι καλλίστους τοὺς ἑωυτῶν νόμους ἕκαστοι εἶναι). Then it is reasonable that no one other than a madman set about laughing at such things. One can form the conclusion that this is the way that all men have observed things concerning nomoi (ὡς δὲ οὕτω νενομίκασι τὰ περὶ τοὺς νόμους οἱ πάντες ἄνθρωποι) from other pieces of evidence and particularly from the following: during his reign, Darius called together those present of the Greeks and asked them for what amount of money they would be willing to eat their fathers after they died. They replied that no amount of money would be enough for them to do this. After this, Darius called those of the Indians called Callatians who do eat their parents and asked them, with the Greeks present and learning what was said through an interpreter, for what amount of money they would accept burning their dead fathers with fire. But they shouted loudly and ordered him to refrain from his impiety. So now these are things of settled custom, and rightly it seems to me that Pindar said that “nomos is king of all” (οὕτω μέν νυν ταῦτα νενόμισται, καὶ ὀρθῶς μοι δοκέει Πίνδαρος ποιῆσαι, νόμον πάντων βασιλέα φήσας εἶναι).

(3.38)

Let us begin by outlining the structure of the argument and then discuss its connection to relativism:⁴⁹

1. A. Cambyses was totally insane

   1. A_1. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have attempted to mock things sacred and customary

      1. A₂. Each people observes that by far the noblest are their own nomoi

   2. A_1. Then it is reasonable that no one other than a madman set about laughing at such things

2. B. This is the way that all men have observed things concerning nomoi

   1. B_1. During his reign, Darius called together …. But they shouted loudly and ordered him to refrain from his impiety

   2. B_1. And rightly it seems to me that Pindar said that “nomos is king of all”

The thesis that Cambyses was in fact mad comes on the heels of his final outrages against what is sacred and customary. He abused the Persians, opened Egyptian tombs, entered temples, and mocked divine images. Proof of the root of this conduct as madness is provided first by a counterfactual – Cambyses wouldn’t have laughed at the sacred and traditional things, as he just has in the temple of Hephaestus, were he not mad. This thesis develops with a further argument: all men consider their own nomoi just, a fact that the narrator proves with a hypothetical “nomological marketplace.” If a marketplace with the world’s nomoi existed, each individual would choose his own culture’s as best. This latter remark recalls Protagoras’ position on social relativism.⁵⁰

Where Herodotus innovates is in the connection of the statement at A₂ that “all men consider their own nomoi best,” to that of A₁ “no one other than a madman would laugh at (foreign) nomoi as Cambyses.” Their conjunction merits clarification – why connect the consideration that one’s own nomoi are best with the position that sober tolerance is the sane response to the diversity of human nomoi? This metaethical response to cultural diversity finds no parallel in Protagoras. Yet, by linking these judgments, Herodotus forestalls the potential objection that Cambyses’ laughter at Egypt is a valid Persian response to alterity. In finding one’s own nomoi best, the individual is led to transfer this awareness to an appreciation of the nomoi of others. Relativism and tolerance are represented as normative responses to diversity. Cambyses, however, fails to draw this conclusion. This is all the more damning since his position as Great King affords him a near-unrivaled vantage point from which to view cultural practices, in a manner akin to the nomological marketplace.

This is further clarified by the historical exemplum from the reign of Darius.⁵¹ The king, like the audience of the Histories, sees the dynamics of relativism unfold in the clash between foreign cultures. Darius tests the tenacity of nomoi by positioning two cultural norms in opposition to one another, creating a bloodless culture war in miniature. When the stress test fails to sway either the Callatian Indians or the Greeks and ends with a reaffirmation of the supremacy of nomos, Darius and the external audience enjoy a double focalization. First, the etic viewpoint affirms the integrity of relativism, by focusing upon the legitimacy of both Greek and Indian burial practices. Cultural relativism holds that there is no objective position on which right and wrong traditional practices can be assessed, and the results of Darius’ experiment emphasize just this fact.⁵² Second, the emic perspective acknowledges the fixity and integrity of cultural norms and traditions for a given society by focalizing the Greek and then Callatian perspectives on burial traditions. The reaction of the Callatians in particular, who practiced a Greek taboo – cannibalism – drives home the validity of the emic vantage point. Not unlike Plato’s Protagoras, for whom whatever seems just and fine to each city is just and fine so long as it observes that customarily, the Histories reveals a willingness to attribute to a given culture its own ethical coherence.⁵³

Returning to Cambyses, we can consider afresh the link between the king’s madness and the recognition that all men hold their own nomoi as best. In confronting Egypt and its exceptionally myopic cultural practices as a Persian aggressor, Cambyses had already staged a cultural experiment similar to that of Darius. Unlike his successor, however, he did not reach the correct conclusion – a failure that is explained by the symptomatic laughter of madness. Taken as a whole, 3.38 affirms the impossibility of a single Archimedean vantage point from which to assess cultural norms. The influence of cultural relativism as a tool for understanding historical action beyond the confines of the Greek world is not, tellingly, met with an equal interest in that associated form of relativism, subjectivism. One might imagine a Protagorean subjectivist suggesting that Cambyses’ reaction was “right for him.” The Histories grants him no such scope, instead processing the narrative of his reign through the suffering of his victims. As the Pindaric citation stresses, it is communal nomos, not the individual, which is supreme. Each society is shaped by its own values, and these values are to be considered appropriate for it. On Humphreys’ analysis, “the point would perhaps be, then, that keeping within the bounds of nomos is what matters, regardless of the variation of nomoi from one society to the next.”⁵⁴ In fact, keeping within the bounds of nomos appears inevitable; barring madness, “nomos is king.”⁵⁵

It seems that the example of funerary cannibalism became a topos in philosophical treatises on relativism, as the author of the Dissoi Logoi makes precisely the same point, but uses the Massagetes as an example of the relativity of values:⁵⁶

Μασσαγέται δὲ τὼς γονέας κατακόψαντες κατέσθοντι, καὶ τάφος κάλλιστος δοκεῖ ἦμεν ἐν τοῖς τέκνοις τεθάφθαι· ἐν δὲ τᾷ Ἑλλάδι αἴ τις ταῦτα ποιήσαι, ἐξελαθεὶς ἐκ τῆς Ἑλλάδος κακῶς κα ἀποθάνοι ὡς αἰσχρὰ καὶ δεινὰ ποιέων.

(2.14)

The Massagetes cut their parents up and eat them, and the seemliest burial is thought by them to be if they are buried within their children; but in Greece if someone were to do these things he would be driven out of Greece and would die terribly as one doing shameful and awful deeds.

The neutrality with which the narrator presents the Callatian Indians’ practice of ancestor-ingestion is a regular feature of Herodotus’ ethnographic excurses, a fact that confirms his affinity for cultural relativism.⁵⁷ For example, in detailing the customs of the savage Taurians, who infamously practiced human sacrifice, Herodotus begins,

Of these people, the Taurians use the following nomoi. They sacrifice to the Maiden shipwrecked people and those of the Greeks whom they seize after putting out to sea, in such a way: they start the sacrifice by striking their head with a club. In fact, some say that they thrust the body down from the cliff (for the shrine is situated on a cliff face) and put their head on a spike; others agree about the head part, however they claim that the body is not thrust down from the cliff, but it is hidden in the earth.

(4.103.1–2)

Herodotus’ description sets aside revulsion in order to engage with the Taurians on their own terms. His often-dispassionate stance, married as it is to an antiquarian hunger for detail on the gory rite of human sacrifice, reveals no value judgment. Contrast the response of Iphigenia on the same practice in Euripides’ tragedy, Iphigenia Among the Taurians:

There is no way that Leto, wife of Zeus, | would have given birth to such stupidity. I | judge too that the feast of Tantalus with the gods | is a faithless tale – that they took pleasure in his son’s flesh; | but I suppose that these here [the Taurians], because they are man-killers (ἀνθρωποκτόνους), | credit their baseness (τὸ φαῦλον) to the goddess.

(386–90)⁵⁸

Iphigenia upholds an objectivism whereby the goddess’ norms are the same everywhere and interprets the Taurians as violating these in her name.

By contrast, Herodotus’ impartiality gradually instills a hermeneutic stance of assessing each group on its own terms. Even in the rare instances in the text where the narrator explicitly makes a value judgment on nomos, this is couched in relative terms. In a discussion of Persian ethnography, for example, the narrator praises two Persian nomoi (1.137.1). As Rosaria Vignolo Munson has persuasively argued, these evaluations are best considered as instances of “opinion” rather than the results of an application of an objective standard, and she connects this praise to narratorial approval on limiting emotional excess.⁵⁹ Elsewhere, a nomos adopted from the Egyptians by Solon is said to be unequivocally “blameless” (2.177.2), as an explanation for its continued use. In the Babylonian ethnography, the “wisest” nomos, the marriage market, is part of a subjective judgment (1.196.1: κατὰ γνώμην τὴν ἡμετέρην, “in my opinion”). While a given society has more or less fine practices, these are not absolute, transcultural assessments.

In this last example, unmarried women are brought together and sold, beginning with the most beautiful. The least attractive are then given dowries from the funds that have been collected from the wealthy individuals willing to buy their comely wives. This exchange of women and circulation of wealth attends to economic and social inequalities. We happen to know that an obscure philosopher, Phaleas of Chalcedon (believed to antedate Plato), agreed. Aristotle mentions that Phaleas supported the careful regulation of inequality to reduce party strife. He recommended that cities adopt a version of the marriage market – that is, to allow the rich to give dowries but not receive them and to allow the poor to accept but not give them (Arist. Pol. 1266b). It is possible that a similar interest in the promotion of equality and social cohesion may underlie Herodotus’ judgment. It may also underpin his critique of Babylon’s “most shameful custom” (1.199.1): mandatory, one-time temple sex work. In this ritual, beautiful women, we are told, can quickly acquit themselves; however, those less favored in appearance may remain waiting for years to complete their service, in a reversal of the equality of opportunity found in the marriage marketplace. Herodotus’ judgments on nomos, positive or negative, are rare. The tantalizing connection between Herodotus’ Babylon and Phaleas’ political philosophical project expose another potential layer to interpreting these – as pointed interventions in debates on civic harmony.

To return to Cambyses, those interpreting the logos as ultimately advocating for tolerance are, on balance, correct.⁶⁰ But if this argument rejects cultural relativism as the logic behind tolerance, then on what account does tolerance become desirable? If there are absolutes in cultural practices, and if Herodotus might accept that there is an objective integrity to the practice of cremation, as an example, why would tolerance be the response to any behavior that departs from this, rather than education or compulsion? Alternatively, if the text advances an implicit position according to which human understanding is too limited to allow for confidence in conclusions about the integrity of a given norm, this also puts the external audience in the position of relativists, in the understanding that all customs are potentially valid, with no objective viewpoint to adjudicate.

One-Man Rule and Decoupling Nomos from Dike

On the strength of the juxtaposition of Cambyses’ madness and the Greco-Callatian deference to tradition, Thomas concludes, “Herodotus respects nomoi whatever their provenance.”⁶¹ As is common to fifth-century thinkers, Herodotus does often ally nomos to its more abstract companion, justice (dike), a fact that goes some way to explaining the reverence that nomos commands.⁶² The Persians “observe as customary” (1.133.1: νομίζουσι) the honoring of their birthday, and “deem it right” (δικαιεῦσι) to have a greater feast on this day. After Cambyses abuses the corpse of the Egyptian king Amasis, the narrator remarks:⁶³

For the Persians hold as customary (νομίζουσι) that fire is a god. Indeed, burning corpses is not at all a nomos for either [Persians or Egyptians]; in the case of the Persians, for the very reason that has been mentioned, since they say that it is not just (δίκαιον) to dispense (νέμειν) the corpse of a man to a god.

(3.16.2–3)

In order to introduce a new nomos, the Persian jurisconsults first judge that it is “just” (3.31.4: δίκαια). A Spartan famed for his justice, Glaucus, when being asked for the return of a deposit, speciously says that he wishes to do “all that is just” (πᾶν τὸ δίκαιον) and then pledges to use Greek nomoi (6.86.β2). In the ominous moments just prior to Plataea, Mardonius refuses to wait for the appropriate Greek sacrifices to turn out positively and instead follows the Persian nomos, which does not require sacrifices before battle, “deeming it right” (9.42.1: δικαιεῦντος).

Yet this is not the entire story. In key passages, the apparent logic of 3.38 – that men respect nomoi no matter their provenance on the basis of their connection to a society’s own justice – is complicated.⁶⁴ As we saw above, Persian despotism and imperial domination have the potential to threaten the initially powerful position that nomos holds in a society.⁶⁵ Cambyses, for example, invents ingenious transgressions of both Persian and Egyptian nomoi, and his actions are treated as unethical for much of the narrative.⁶⁶ However, his position as operating outside of Persian norms loses its force during the course of his reign, in a development that reflects powerfully on the histor’s place in the current philosophical debate on the relativity of values and justice.

Cambyses’ madness manifests itself in a succession of murders that first take place against his family. He orders the death of his brother, Smerdis, and then his sister; in one variant, he even kills his unborn child.⁶⁷ The description of the murder of the king’s sister-wife is of particular interest, as it includes, unlike the chronological progression of the death of Smerdis, a narratorial analepsis that nests an account of the king’s constitutional position, which led to his marriage to his sister prior to the Egyptian campaign.⁶⁸ The analepsis is structured around the chronic inability of the ruler to ally himself to Persian nomos, but his status as a transgressor of nomos is not upheld.⁶⁹

He married her in this way. For the Persians were not at all previously accustomed to cohabit with their sisters (οὐδαμῶς γὰρ ἐώθεσαν πρότερον τῇσι ἀδελφεῇσι συνοικέειν Πέρσαι). Cambyses grew lustful for one of his sisters and next, wishing to marry her, since he was contriving to do what was not customary (οὐκ ἐωθότα ἐπενόεε ποιήσειν), he summoned those called royal judges and asked them if there was some nomos bidding one who wished to cohabit with his sister (εἴ τις ἐστὶ κελεύων νόμος τὸν βουλόμενον ἀδελφεῇ συνοικέειν). The royal judges are select Persian men who serve up until they die or something unjust is discovered about them. These men decide lawsuits for the Persians and they are expounders of the ancestral laws and everything is referred to them. So then, when Cambyses asked them, they gave him a just (δίκαια) and safe answer, saying that they could not discover any nomos which orders a brother to cohabit with his sister; however, they had discovered another nomos, that it is permitted for the king of the Persians to do whatever he wishes (φάμενοι νόμον οὐδένα ἐξευρίσκειν ὃς κελεύει ἀδελφεῇ συνοικέειν ἀδελφεόν, ἄλλον μέντοι ἐξευρηκέναι νόμον, τῷ βασιλεύοντι Περσέων ἐξεῖναι ποιέειν τὸ ἂν βούληται). In this way they did not break the nomos (οὕτω οὔτε τὸν νόμον ἔλυσαν). Since they were afraid of Cambyses, they discovered in addition another nomos as an ally to one wanting to marry his sisters, in order that they themselves not die by preserving the nomos (ἵνα [τε] μὴ αὐτοὶ ἀπόλωνται τὸν νόμον περιστέλλοντες, παρεξεῦρον ἄλλον νόμον σύμμαχον τῷ θέλοντι γαμέειν ἀδελφεάς).

(3.31.2–5)

Incest is a particularly powerful expression of alienation from norms, as this practice provides the foundation for society’s categorization of identity and difference.⁷⁰ The contravention of this taboo serves to illustrate Cambyses’ rivalry with the divine, his acute social estrangement, and his obsession with the self. Motivated by the fact that his desire to marry his sister is “not customary” (οὐκ ἐωθότα), Cambyses approaches Persia’s specialized jurisconsults to find a constitutional loophole.⁷¹ Herodotus narrates an additional complication: Persia’s legal experts cannot be discovered adjusting nomos without being disbarred or worse. This presents a problem, as Persia does not allow incestuous marriages, but neither could the legal experts expect to avoid a gruesome end by upholding Persian nomos if they rejected Cambyses’ request.⁷² Resolution arises from their “discovery” or “invention” (ἐξευρηκέναι) of another nomos: “to the ruler of the Persians it is permitted to do whatever he wishes.” Cambyses enters seeking a nomos to allow one to marry his sister and leaves with a much more comprehensive mandate – whatever the actions of the king, they are embraced under a sweeping law that sanctions them. This nomos resolves the Persian jurisconsults’ legal paradox, while very carefully avoiding the dismantling of Persian nomos against incest (οὔτε τὸν νόμον ἔλυσαν, “nor did they rescind the law”). Cambyses no longer conflicts with nomos, given the identification of the ruler with what is custom, law, and tradition, and this results in an uneasy compromise between the destruction of nomos and justification of behavior that is contrary to it.

The rare collocation ἐξευρηκέναι νόμον (exeurekenai nomon) itself may point to this tension. On its own, ἐξευρίσκω refers to “finding out” and “discovering” something amidst a given set of options.⁷³ In Aristophanes’ Clouds, the Better Argument asks the Worse how it can possibly defeat a superior position, to which the latter responds, “by finding out novel propositions” (Nub. 896: γνώμας καινὰς ἐξευρίσκων). It can also be applied to nomos, however, as in Antiphon’s On the Murder of Herodes. The defendant, Euxitheus, accuses the prosecution of presenting their case against him on the wrong charge in the wrong court and reproaches his prosecutor for “discovering laws” to suit himself, αὐτὸς σεαυτῷ νόμους ἐξευρών (12). This paradoxical phrasing uses “discovery” not in connection with preexisting laws, as the term would normally imply, but with the innovation of laws “for yourself.” The notion of individualistic nomoi disrupts their usual association with community values. Instead, laws are discovered for the individual. This kind of almost contradictory usage finds a parallel in the English phrase, “being a law unto oneself.”⁷⁴ In the Histories, the terms are also found together in the Candaules-Gyges logos in the first transgression of nomos, when Candaules suggests that Gyges view his wife naked. Gyges protests, “long ago noble things have been discovered by men … and I beg you not to enjoin what is contrary to nomos” (1.8.4: πάλαι δὲ τὰ καλὰ ἀνθρώποισι ἐξεύρηται … καὶ σέο δέομαι μὴ δέεσθαι ἀνόμων).⁷⁵ The ancients’ dictum to “look to one’s own” is a discovery that is here set in stark contrast with the immoral proposal of Candaules. Similarly, when the Babylonians discover a new nomos for liquidity, the narrator glosses it as “lately they have found some other thing: everyone destitute of livelihood prostitutes his daughters” (1.196.5: ἄλλο δέ τι ἐξευρήκασι νεωστὶ … πᾶς τις τοῦ δήμου βίου σπανίζων καταπορνεύει τὰ θήλεα τέκνα). These passages provide additional context for the actions of the Persian jurisconsults, who are “finding out a nomos,” that is innovating and establishing a practice as a custom by fiat. This process undercuts the temporality of custom as something established communally and legitimated by time.⁷⁶ It is clear that in composing this piece, which occurs, importantly, prior to the invasion of Egypt, Herodotus retrojects the rupture of nomos and popular morality into the earliest moments of the reign of Cambyses.⁷⁷

The origins of nomos are recorded elsewhere in the Histories, and they follow a clear pattern. When the narrative presents the audience with the establishment of a new nomos, these are authorized collectively. After the Argive defeat at Thyrea, the Argives as a people (Ἀργεῖοι) establish two nomoi: to keep their hair shorn and to forbid women to wear gold prior to retaking Thyrea (1.82.7).⁷⁸ Simultaneously, the victors in this battle, the Lacedaemonians (Λακεδαιμόνιοι), establish a counter-nomos to grow their hair (1.82.8). In a similar manner, the Argives and Aeginetans make a custom (5.88.2: ἔτι τόδε ποιῆσαι νόμον εἶναι παρὰ σφίσι ἑκατέροισι) of wearing brooches twice as large as they had previously, in celebration of their victory against the Athenians and in support of the Athenian women who killed, with their dress pins, the single soldier who had survived the Argive-Aeginetan slaughter. They also collectively observe an embargo against Athenian goods and begin a custom (5.88.2: νόμον) of pouring libations only from their own local wares. The women of Caria impose a nomos (1.146.3: νόμον) that forbids their eating with their Ionian husbands. This is in recompense for their husbands’ murdering the Carian women’s parents, prior husbands, and children.⁷⁹ As a general rule, then, the introduction and maintenance of nomos is a socially constituted phenomenon. Lawgivers also pass legislation, which might initially appear to ally nomos to the individual; however, these figures are in fact presented as conduits of the people and as vehicles for their communal values. Solon, for example, enacts nomoi for the Athenians; in this case, the histor insists on the importance of the populace in introducing and authorizing his action. First, the “Athenians” en masse request new nomoi from Solon (1.29.1: ὃς Ἀθηναίοισι νόμους κελεύσασι ποιήσας, “he had made laws for the Athenians who ordered it”), and then the people as a whole agree to obey his nomoi “with powerful oaths” (1.29.2: ὁρκίοισι γὰρ μεγάλοισι). The complicity of the collective is obvious and should not be glossed over. So too, the narrative stresses the collective endorsement of Lycurgus as a lawgiver: after his death, the Spartans as a body establish a temple and cultic worship for him (1.65.5).⁸⁰ Famously, “the Persians especially admit foreign nomaia” (1.135), and the Persian collective is stressed throughout this passage. The portrait that coalesces from the text is that nomoi are socially constructed practices, a set of parameters that establish justice and injustice within a given group.

Returning to Cambyses, the nomos justifying his incest is in tension with the authorized body of nomoi that the Persian jurisconsults are meant to protect. Yet, if we follow the communis opinio, “Herodotus never questions the obligations that nomos imposes.”⁸¹ Indeed, the immediately succeeding episodes on the nomological marketplace and the experiment of Darius would apparently confirm this, were it not for the complications presented by the Persian legal experts’ constitutional ruling on Cambyses. This ruling allows the despot to be reintegrated into the fabric of Persian normative behavior, as his actions are now in line with legality and justice, although they contravene what is popularly moral. In crafting this passage, Herodotus moves beyond the position that Cambyses attacks nomos and begins to engage with contemporary debates on nomos and the philosophical implications of relativism.⁸²

Observe first that Cambyses’ constitutional position is to serve as a kind of criterion of nomos.⁸³ This identification is clearly participating in a contemporary political-philosophical discussion on the problematic relationship of the tyrant to nomos. In Euripides’ Suppliants, the Athenian king Theseus gives a defense of democracy that criticizes tyranny as allowing one man to monopolize nomos: “One man rules, having acquired nomos for himself: and there is no longer equality” (431–2: κρατεῖ δ᾽ εἷς τὸν νόμον κεκτημένος | αὐτὸς παρ᾽ αὑτῷ: καὶ τόδ᾽ οὐκέτ᾽ ἔστ᾽ ἴσον).⁸⁴ Theseus prefaces this with “because first of all there are no common nomoi” (430–1: ὅπου τὸ μὲν πρώτιστον οὐκ εἰσὶν νόμοι | κοινοί). Theseus’ rejection of this constitutional system rests on the fact that it eliminates equality (ἴσον), the popular consensus that forms the foundation of nomos as it is so often conceived. In a tyranny, the source of nomos resides in the figure of the tyrant himself, which fosters arbitrariness in the application and administration of justice. Equality signifies, by contrast, the universal access that citizens have to the law and to the stability of its referents.⁸⁵

The playwright’s fragmentary Antigone also fulminates against the identity of the ruler with nomos: “It is not fitting to rule, nor ought one be a tyrant without nomoi” (TrGF F 172.1–2 Kannicht: οὔτ’ εἰκὸς ἄρχειν οὔτ᾿ ἐχρῆν ἄνευ νόμων | τύραννον εἶναι). It is clear that this became something of a commonplace, as in the Prometheus Bound, the chorus accuses Zeus of taking possession of justice for himself, οἶδ’ ὅτι τραχὺς καὶ παρ’ ἑαυτῷ | τὸ δίκαιον ἔχων Ζεύς (186–7: “I know that Zeus is harsh, making justice his own prerogative”), in a jab at his tyrannical behavior. Private law recurs as a characterization of Zeus’ rule, “These are the miseries that come from Zeus’ governing with his private nomoi; he displays an arrogant temper to the prior divinities” (402–5: ἀμέγαρτα γὰρ τάδε Ζεὺς | ἰδίοις νόμοις κρατύνων | ὑπερήφανον θεοῖς τοῖς | πάρος ἐνδείκνυσιν αἰχμάν), and this cements the status of the new sovereign as a tyrannos rather than a basileus.⁸⁶ Again, the source of nomos is arrogated by the individual ruler and critiqued.

That Herodotus styles Cambyses’ constitutional position on the model of the tyrant comes as no surprise; however, the choice to do so through a justification of incest is provocative. Recall that Pheidippides, in his artful display of New Learning, scandalized his father by performing Euripides’ famous anthem to incest in the Aeolus.⁸⁷ As I noted above, in this tragedy the protagonist, Macareus, infamously advocated incest, which resulted in the deaths of his sister and their unborn child⁸⁸ – a request that likely included the oft-parodied line, “what is shameful, if it does not seem so to those practicing it” (F 19: τί δ’ αἰσχρὸν ἢν μὴ τοῖσι χρωμένοις δοκῇ;). In the Frogs, Aeschylus repeatedly portrays this as shocking and maligns Euripides for introducing incest into the art of tragedy (850: γάμους δ᾽ ἀνοσίους ἐσφέρων ἐς τὴν τέχνην).⁸⁹ Pheidippides’ decision to sing it suggests that this was thematically associated with the philosophical tradition of the time, and it must be an attack on popular morality. Evidence for relativizing incest also comes from the Dissoi Logoi. There, the philosopher argues for the relativity of values on the grounds that Persian men practice incest with their daughters, mothers, and sisters.⁹⁰ This is contrasted with the practices of the Greeks, who find these actions morally reprehensible and lawless, αἰσχρὰ καὶ παράνομα (aischra kai paranoma).

It is clear that incest was a contested index in the debate on cultural relativism from the supporters of objective ethical norms as well. Opponents of relativism deployed it as an instance of exactly the opposite view, pointing to the absence of incest in human societies as an indication of universal nomoi. Xenophon recounts a dialogue between Socrates and Hippias on the definition of nomos, where Socrates’ positive answer holds that nomos is (1) whatever is legal in a given city but that (2) universal unwritten nomoi also exist, mandating, for example, fear of the gods, requital of benefits, and, suggestively, prohibitions against incest.⁹¹ The historical Hippias was well aware of the diversity of nomoi, and thus Xenophon’s incarnation of the philosopher fittingly draws attention to the fact that this is not a divine nomos, because it is transgressed.⁹² This leads Socrates to counter that natural punishments follow inevitably from the transgression of divine nomoi; for example, children born from incestuous couplings are unhealthy. The Athenian Stranger in Plato’s Laws makes an identical statement on the objectivity of morality regarding incest, remarking that in all serious tragedy, “when they lead in the Thyesteses or some Oedipuses or Macareuses having intercourse in secret with their sisters, are they not seen as willingly affixing the penalty of death upon themselves as a judgment for their sins?”⁹³ Although in Herodotus’ own time Persians practiced such intermarriage, historicizing this phenomenon in the reign of Cambyses allows the audience of the Histories to view its origins as outside of Persian custom and tradition and to assess Cambyses as a “Macareus.”

In the context of the discussion sketched above, it is perhaps intelligible that Herodotus crafts the despot Cambyses along lines that trace questions of incest and then segues into a discussion on the relativity of values. By making Cambyses the arbiter of nomos, the Histories dramatizes the fraying relationship between nomos, popular morality, and justice in Persia, where subjectivism – or the notion that what seems right to the individual is right, independent of societal norms – reigns in the form of the Great King.⁹⁴ The particular focus on incest as nomos, which is immediately followed by a mandate of cultural relativism, raises the question: does nomos remain “king of all” in the context of the perversion of popular morality? The epitaph on Cambyses’ madness suggests otherwise. The Histories continually represents the actions of the ruler as an assault, rather than jarringly integrating him into the frame of tradition, custom, and law, as the Persian jurisconsults do. Accordingly, in the process of an endorsement of cultural relativism, the Histories subtly critiques Persian subjectivism. The narrative maintains the importance of the social body as the arbiter of nomos, even in a society dominated by the individual.

The interpretation that Cambyses exemplifies the tension in nomos and popular morality finds additional support in the context of Herodotus’ quotation of Pindar, which unites two previously opposed elements of the narrative, νόμος (nomos) and βασιλεύς (basileus).⁹⁵ The gnomic statement from the premier fifth-century melic poet is often thought to confer weight on the judgment that Cambyses was mad due to the universal human practice of considering one’s own nomoi just. Yet, Herodotus’ inclusion of the verse is not simply ornamental; on the contrary, read in light of what remains of Pindar’s F 169a, it reveals a deeper engagement with Pindaric poetics.⁹⁶

What may initially appear a gnomic statement in the Histories is revealed as quite a novel thesis in Pindar: Nomos, ruler of all, governs the following paradoxical phrase, ἄγει δικαιῶν τὸ βιαιότατον | ὑπερτάτᾳ χειρί, “Nomos leads, deeming just what is most violent with the highest hand.” Here, nomos is metaphorically represented as a monarch ruling with the utmost power and deeming what is the pitch of violence just. Nomos as monarchic is a vivid and astonishing image. Fifth-century political slogans in both aristocracies and democracies touted nomos as the opposition to one-man rule.⁹⁷ Their ambiguous coalition in Pindar manifests in a further paradox, in that its actions result in “justifying what is most violent,” δικαιῶν τὸ βιαιότατον.⁹⁸ The tension between the two concepts – justice and violence – is an obvious and disturbing one. Pindar supports this proposition with a proof, τεκμαίρομαι (tekmairomai), “I cite as evidence,” and the rest of the extant song relates Heracles’ violent theft of the cattle of Geryon and, then in greater detail, his seizure of the man-eating horses of the Thracian king Diomedes.⁹⁹ In each instance, Heracles’ actions are charged in ethically negative ways: the theft of the cattle is explicitly ἀπριάτας, “without purchase money,” a condemnable act.¹⁰⁰ Diomedes’ struggle against Heracles is carefully qualified as one of honorable opposition, οὐ κό]ρῳ ἀλλ’ ἀρετᾷ (“not with insolence, but with virtue”), ruling out the potential traditional mythographic reading that has Heracles justly punish Diomedes. The scholiast explains, “Not with hybris, but virtue. For not disregarding one’s possessions is the act of a brave man, not of a violent one. And Heracles was unjust to take (them) away.”¹⁰¹ Heracles is poised in opposition to the monarch; his entrance is a violent intrusion, a “path of force in the night” (ν]υ̣κτὶ βίας ὁδόν). It is clear that he has thrown one of the horses’ grooms into the stall from the sound of crunching bones, a grim presage of the fate that awaits Diomedes according to tradition. While in another variant Diomedes was killed for feeding men to his horses, in this vignette it is Heracles who perpetrates the injustice.¹⁰² Finally, the remainder of what is intelligible recounts Heracles’ theft of the mares and completion of his labor. There is a clear logic to fragment 169a as we have it: Pindar opposes a violent Heracles to Geryon and then Diomedes and, in doing so, forcible seizure to valiant opposition. The initial injustice of Heracles is amply narrated; its justification, if it ever existed, where a monarchic Nomos sanctified Heracles, has been lost. Kevin Crotty well observes of Pindar’s practice here that “rather than correct tradition, to bring it into line with the customary distinctions of moral categories, he reflects rather on the power of nomos to make men hold contradictory beliefs, so that they revere what they condemn and condemn behavior (Diomedes’) which they elsewhere commend.”¹⁰³

The nomological marketplace immediately precedes the fragment of Pindar in the Histories, and thus it is of interest that it is reminiscent of another fragment of Pindar: ἄλλα δ’ ἄλλοισιν νόμιμα, σφετέραν δ’ αἰνεῖ δίκαν ἕκαστος (215a).¹⁰⁴ Without additional context, it is difficult to draw too many conclusions; however, it is strikingly similar in content to Herodotus’ relativizing statements here on the variability of nomos and its validity for each social body. Herodotus uses relativism as a foil for explaining the abnormality of Cambyses – this is a king who defies human nature.¹⁰⁵ Noteworthy too is Herodotus’ ἄλλοισι τεκμηρίοισι (“among other proofs”), which transitions into a historical exemplum from the reign of Darius. This evokes Pindar’s own τεκμαίρομαι | ἔργοισιν (“I cite as evidence | the deeds”) in 169a.4–5, introducing as it does Heracles’ injustice against Geryon and Diomedes.¹⁰⁶

If we ignore the Pindaric hypotext, the quotation could be interpreted as a gnomic statement illustrating the easy resistance of nomos to hegemonic force. That is, Herodotus would juxtapose kingship and nomos in the final analysis to illustrate the triumph of the latter over the former and to hint at the reestablishment of normativity following the reign of Cambyses. Yet what is distinctive to Cambyses’ rule is his ability to justify his attacks on popular morality as instantiations of nomos. In this sense, the reference to Pindar activates a network of meanings – on the disturbing and ambiguous power of nomos as a force in the justification of violence.

The historical narrative of one-man rule in Persia continues to develop the dynamic whereby nomos and its relationship to popular morality are called into question. Following the death of Cambyses and the conspiracy of the Magi, the narrative turns to the famous Constitutional Debate, during which three speakers in succession address the merits and defects of democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy. In doing so, they present a fifth-century political-philosophical tour de force.¹⁰⁷ The first speaker, Otanes, speaks in support of democracy, specifically calling attention to one-man rule as a constitutional form that outrages Persian tradition. As has been noted, his encomium of democracy takes the form of a postmortem on the reign of Cambyses.¹⁰⁸ Otanes’ strongest argument for the move to a participatory form of government is his assertion that the institution of monarchy has inherent deficiencies:

κῶς δ᾽ ἂν εἴη χρῆμα κατηρτημένον μουναρχίη, τῇ ἔξεστι ἀνευθύνῳ ποιέειν τὰ βούλεται; καὶ γὰρ ἂν τὸν ἄριστον ἀνδρῶν πάντων στάντα ἐς ταύτην τὴν ἀρχὴν ἐκτὸς τῶν ἐωθότων νοημάτων στήσειε.

(3.80.3)

How can monarchy be a properly regulated thing in a system where it is permitted for the monarch to do what he wishes with no accounting for it? For even if one were to set the best of all men in this constitutional system, still it would put him outside of all customary thoughts.

Otanes identifies a structural error within monarchy and in doing so obliquely critiques the verdict of the legal exegetes on royal nomos, that “the king has the right to do whatever he wishes” (τῷ βασιλεύοντι Περσέων ἐξεῖναι ποιέειν τὸ ἂν βούληται), in the same language, τῇ ἔξεστι ἀνευθύνῳ ποιέειν τὰ βούλεται (“where it is permitted for the monarch to do what he wishes with no accounting for it”). His critical reading of this nomos is evident through the addition of ἀνεύθυνος (aneuthynos), literally, “not capable of being straightened”;¹⁰⁹ it is a democratic terminus technicus associated with a critique of tyranny, in that the ruler is not subject to the checks that are in place for keeping democratic officials “straight.” In his endorsement of isonomie at the end of his speech, Otanes also introduces its antithesis, ὑπεύθυνος (hypeuthynos), “liable to give an account of one’s administration of office” and draws attention to the problematic nature of allowing an individual to be a law unto himself.¹¹⁰ So too, in the Persians, Aeschylus’ Atossa says of Xerxes that he is “not liable to give an account to the polis” (213: οὐχ ὑπεύθυνος πόλει). For Otanes, this constitutional flaw is compounded by a structural one in human nature: phthonos is an innate feature of man. Compounded by the hybris that kingship breeds, monarchy is a system that consistently puts man “outside customary thoughts,” ἐκτὸς τῶν ἐωθότων νοημάτων, thus corrupting the individual from the inside out.¹¹¹ Otanes’ speech again touches upon the abnormal behavior of Cambyses, who had approached the Persian jurisconsults requesting a nomos for incest, “because he was contriving to do what was not customary” ὅτι οὐκ ἐωθότα ἐπενόεε ποιήσειν. This judgment treats Cambyses’ incestuous desire as an outgrowth of the disease of one-man rule, which in Persia disrupts the individual’s relationship to nomos while at the same time identifying him with it.

In a rising crescendo of reproaches against monarchy, Otanes lodges his greatest criticism in an echo of the narrator, that the king “disturbs ancestral customs,” νόμαιά τε κινέει πάτρια (3.80.5).¹¹² He then opposes the fairest name, “equality under the law” (ἰσονομίη) to the excesses of monarchy. Equality under the law mandates liability in office (ὑπεύθυνον δὲ ἀρχὴν) and removes the potential for any individual to subsume the power of law. Otanes’ use of isonomie in this context, instead of the more obvious opposition to tyranny, demokratia, requires explanation.¹¹³ After all, on three separate occasions, the Histories does refer explicitly to democracy. In the debate between Miltiades and Histaeus on whether the Ionians should leave their position and abandon the Persians under Darius’ command in Scythia, Histiaeus is able to prevail by threatening the future dissolution of their tyrannies and the establishment of more popular democratic constitutions (4.137.2). In a moment of historical irony, after the Ionian revolt – itself the product of the same Histiaeus’ machinations – the Persian Mardonius demolishes the Ionian tyrannies and installs democracies in their respective poleis (6.43.3). Finally, at the conclusion of the courting of Agariste episode, Cleisthenes is said to be the outcome of the marriage and the originator of the Athenian democracy (6.131.1).

In the middle of the twentieth century, Gregory Vlastos argued forcefully for isonomia as the popular term for democracy before demokratia came into vogue, using Otanes’ terminology as primary evidence.¹¹⁴ Given the later instances in the Histories in which democracy was referred to as such, Vlastos argued as an “analyst” that the Constitutional Debate’s composition preceded Books 4 and 6 and thus Herodotus’ knowledge of the terms demokratia and demokrateomai necessarily came later. The analyst position is, however, vitiated on the basis of arbitrariness, as there is no firm evidence and no consensus on when any book of the Histories was written.¹¹⁵ More persuasive is the interpretation that the reference to isonomie is tailored to Otanes as a speaker; it is a proleptic look at the opposition of tyranny to a broader set of isonomic Greek constitutional forms, including “mixed” constitutions such as Sparta; and perhaps also a demonstration of the way in which Otanes is not fully versed in the language or the reality of democracy.¹¹⁶

This usage, then, is comprehensible when considered in light of the opposition that Otanes is making. In the speech, Persian monarchy is structurally flawed due to the tension between the monarch who acts as a nomos unto himself while also rejecting ancestral nomos. Otanes dismisses this constitutional form for its flawed nomological basis and rhetorically drives this home by defining its opposition as isonomie. “Equality before the law” curtails individualist legality more appropriately than demokratia.¹¹⁷ Isonomie is a particularly effective opposition to monarchy given the system of private law developed by the jurisconsults for Cambyses. Otanes reasserts the force of traditional Persian morality in his critique of the legislation allowing the king to do as he wishes and in his affirmation of the king as an assaulter of nomaia.

In the final speech, in support of kingship, Darius obliquely concludes with an answer to Otanes’ condemnation of monarchy but rejects his assessment in a shrewd peritrope.¹¹⁸

ἔχω τοίνυν γνώμην ἡμέας ἐλευθερωθέντας διὰ ἕνα ἄνδρα τὸ τοιοῦτο περιστέλλειν, χωρίς τε τούτου πατρίους νόμους μὴ λύειν ἔχοντας εὖ· οὐ γὰρ ἄμεινον

(3.82.5)

Moreover, I offer my opinion that since we were freed by one man we should support this system – and apart from this, that we should not dissolve our ancestral nomoi that are sound. For it is not better.

Darius calls upon tradition too, by appealing to the first Persian King, Cyrus. Cyrus had made himself monarch in place of the Median Astyages and thereby established hereditary Persian kingship – reason enough for the institution to persist in the tense moments following the Magian uprising against Persian rule. Just as Otanes had alluded to the Persian jurisconsults, in order to critique them, so too Darius echoes their language. The verb περιστέλλειν (peristellein) is the same as that used by the legal experts in the context of their justification of their new nomos: οὕτω οὔτε τὸν νόμον ἔλυσαν δείσαντες <τε> Καμβύσεα, ἵνα [τε] μὴ αὐτοὶ ἀπόλωνται τὸν νόμον περιστέλλοντες παρεξεῦρον ἄλλον νόμον σύμμαχον (3.31.5: “In this way they did not break the nomos, and since they were afraid of Cambyses, in order that they themselves not die by preserving the nomos, they discovered in addition another nomos as an ally”).¹¹⁹ Darius’ second injunction, not to “dissolve the ancestral nomoi” (πατρίους νόμους μὴ λύειν) of monarchy also corresponds to the jurisconsults’ desire to maintain Persian nomos so as not to suffer punishment from Cambyses, οὕτω οὔτε τὸν νόμον ἔλυσαν.¹²⁰ Darius’ speech subtly recodes the language of this justification of the regal nomos into a broader endorsement of kingship on the basis of tradition and conservatism.¹²¹ He revises Otanes’ νόμαια πάτρια (“ancestral customs”), translating them from traditional moral behavior into traditional regal power. The naturalization of monarchy as Persian tradition places those in opposition to it in the position of disturbing nomos. It is a shrewd rebuttal of Otanes’ statement.¹²² Through the juxtaposition of the two Persian grandees and the ultimate success of Darius’ reading of Persian ancestral nomos, the narrative again thematizes a rift between custom, tradition, law, and popular morality.

In the epilogue to this Debate, the impasse reached by Otanes and Darius is reconfirmed. The defeated Otanes announces his intention to withdraw himself from consideration for the kingship, provided that he and his line remain outside of this rule. After the conspirators all agree to these terms, the mimetic dialogue breaks, and the narrator mischievously concludes, “Even now this house alone of the Persians continues to be free and is ruled only as much as it wishes, if it does not transgress the nomoi of the Persians (3.83.3: νόμους οὐκ ὑπερβαίνουσα τοὺς Περσέων).”¹²³ After these speeches, one wonders: whose nomoi? Is Otanes focalized, for whom kingship is antithetical to nomos? Or Darius, who successfully defines Persian nomos as kingship?¹²⁴ The narrative’s denouement plays its final note on just this ambiguity, leaving the tension between royal nomos and Persian tradition unresolved.¹²⁵

It is instructive to compare the differing identifications of nomos that we find in the speeches of Otanes and Darius with another Constitutional Debate, that between Pericles and Alcibiades in Xenophon’s Memorabilia. In the course of Xenophon’s argument that Socrates did not corrupt Critias and Alcibiades, nor incite them to their later excesses, Xenophon recounts their initial companionship with Socrates. This companionship, we are warned, was always already subordinate to the goal of their eventual political hegemony. An example of this is given in the form of Alcibiades’ eristic dialogue with the first man of Athens, Pericles. The youthful Alcibiades begins by questioning Pericles on the definition of nomos, a topic of philosophical importance, as we have seen. Pericles gives the rather bland response that nomos is identical to the people’s legislative acts in the assembly, “for all these are nomoi that the majority after coming together and making a scrutiny of them, ordained, indicating through them what one ought and ought not do (1.2.42).” After Pericles is made to agree that the outcome of law is τἀγαθά (“what is good”), Alcibiades sets out to refine this definition by questioning the importance of the majority to nomos: “But if, as happens under an oligarchy, not the majority, but a minority (ὀλίγοι) meet and enact rules of conduct, what are these (1.2.43)?” Alcibiades presses the implications of this definition of nomos for a non-democratic polity. Forced to modify his statement, Pericles gives an answer not unlike that of a Protagoras, whereby all ruling legislative bodies pass nomoi. The dialogue continues:

κἂν τύραννος οὖν κρατῶν τῆς πόλεως γράψῃ τοῖς πολίταις ἃ χρὴ ποιεῖν, καὶ ταῦτα νόμος ἐστί; καὶ ὅσα τύραννος ἄρχων, φάναι, γράφει, καὶ ταῦτα νόμος καλεῖται. βία δέ, φάναι, καὶ ἀνομία τί ἐστιν, ὦ Περίκλεις; ἆρ’ οὐχ ὅταν ὁ κρείττων τὸν ἥττω μὴ πείσας, ἀλλὰ βιασάμενος, ἀναγκάσῃ ποιεῖν ὅ τι ἂν αὐτῷ δοκῇ; ἔμοιγε δοκεῖ, φάναι τὸν Περικλέα. καὶ ὅσα ἄρα τύραννος μὴ πείσας τοὺς πολίτας ἀναγκάζει ποιεῖν γράφων, ἀνομία ἐστί; δοκεῖ μοι, φάναι τὸν Περικλέα· ἀνατίθεμαι γὰρ τὸ ὅσα τύραννος μὴ πείσας γράφει νόμον εἶναι.

(1.2.43–4)

[Alcibiades:] “So, then, even if a tyrant who rules over the city prescribes what the citizens ought to do, are these things nomos as well?” And he [Pericles] said, “whatever a ruling tyrant prescribes is also called a nomos.” “But,” he responded, “what is force and lawlessness, Pericles? Is it not when the stronger party compels the weaker party, not by persuasion but by force, to do whatever seems good to him?” “I certainly think so,” said Pericles. “Consequently, whatever a tyrant compels his citizens to do, not by persuasion, but by prescription, is it lawlessness?” “I think so,” said Pericles. “For I retract the position that whatever a tyrant prescribes, unless through persuasion, is nomos.”

Pericles initially expands his definition to include the variety of constitutional forms that his interlocutor confronts him with, identifying nomos with the generic head of state. Alcibiades draws out the flaw in this argument by raising tyranny as a limiting case study, which is by definition a constitutional form that governs by force rather than persuasion. The association of nomos with convention remains strong, and this calls into question the legitimacy of Pericles’ position; on his reading, the compulsory edicts of a tyrant would have the same legal force as those passed by persuasion in a democratic assembly. The tyrant dismantles tradition, and this ultimately forces Pericles to withdraw his assessment of the definition of nomos to emphasize again the importance of its status as socially supported. As a constitutional form, tyranny is ultimately recognized as antithetical to the establishment and maintenance of nomos. The sophistic nature of the discussion is explicitly flagged by Pericles, who tells Alcibiades “on such things we exercised our ingenuity and devised as those you seem to me now to preoccupy yourself with” (1.2.46).

Xenophon’s recounting of the discussion between Pericles and Alcibiades, if historically improbable, remains a valuable witness to the contested nature of nomos, continuing into the early fourth century.¹²⁶ More importantly, it resonates with the issues debated in Herodotus’ Constitutional Debate. The position of the ruler in relation to nomos was evidently one of importance. Yet the conclusion of Alcibiades, Pericles, and Otanes, that the tyrant who rules by force is at odds with nomos, is one that the Persian conspirators ultimately reject when they side with Darius and reinstitute Persian monarchical rule. Darius is able to turn the tables on Otanes by identifying nomos not with Persian norms that are being transgressed by the ruler but with the ancestral tradition of monarchy, which the seven conspirators themselves are putting under threat by questioning its efficacy.¹²⁷ Like Pheidippides after his time in the “Thinkery,” Darius weaponizes nomos. In the latter’s case, it elides a critique of monarchy as ethically corrosive. One-man rule in Persia adapts itself to a logic whereby the unjust actions of the Great King are naturalized as cultural tradition. As fifth-century philosophical debates did, so too does the text dramatize the fraying of justice’s relationship to nomos.¹²⁸

The Project of Empire and Justice

The separation of nomos from considerations of justice continues to evolve beyond the reign of Cambyses, through the exploration of the Persian Empire’s role in the suffocation of local identities. Persian expansion threatens individual societies’ customs, traditions, and laws, through the imposition of its own nomoi. The apparently simple calculus of 3.38, whereby nomos is king of all, is vexed yet again through the confrontation of nomoi within an imperial structure. It is clear from the start of the Persian imperialist project that foreign nomoi will suffer. The histor singles out Babylon’s “wisest” nomos, the marriage auction, for a long and encomiastic description. His concluding statement reveals, however, that this is not a custom that exists any longer – this was Babylon’s best custom, though the narrator only draws attention to this at the end of his description:

ὁ μέν νυν κάλλιστος νόμος οὗτός σφι ἦν, οὐ μέντοι νῦν γε διατελέει ἐών, ἄλλο δέ τι ἐξευρήκασι νεωστὶ γενέσθαι [ἵνα μὴ ἀδικοῖεν αὐτὰς μηδ’ εἰς ἑτέραν πόλιν ἄγωνται]. ἐπείτε γὰρ ἁλόντες ἐκακώθησαν καὶ οἰκοφθορήθησαν, πᾶς τις τοῦ δήμου βίου σπανίζων καταπορνεύει τὰ θήλεα τέκνα.

(1.196.5)

Now their finest custom was this; however, it does not continue nowadays, but lately they have discovered something new. For, after they were seized, maltreated, and had their resources ruined, every member of the people in need of a livelihood prostitutes his female children.

Herodotus is careful to emphasize that the destruction of this custom is a result of the Persian imperialist project, and in this way the ethnography represents not just a synchronic portrait of the cultural landscape of Babylon but a diachronic one that draws out the social cost of Persian hegemony. Likewise, Herodotus’ elaboration of Egyptian nomos is painstaking in its detail, a fact that throws into relief the corruption of these traditions that will occur after Cambyses’ conquest. That the extinction of individual Greek autonomy is at stake in the Greco-Persian Wars is evident, for example, in the forced establishment of democracies in Ionia by Mardonius (6.43.3). This is even more clear at the end of the Histories, where Xerxes communicates through his Macedonian mouthpiece, Alexander, a message on coming to terms with Persia. Athens will not only receive as gifts from Persia additional land and temples but do so, “while being ruled by its own nomoi” (ἐόντες αὐτόνομοι).¹²⁹ Xerxes’ words are intended to allay a real anxiety, namely, the suppression of local nomoi. By contrast, the Persians’ imperial reach makes them the most willing of all peoples to adopt the nomoi of others (1.135); however, they do so on their own terms.

The attack on indigenous nomoi that Persian rule represents is perhaps most forcefully demonstrated during a Persian embassy to Macedonia, to the king Amyntas and this same Alexander.¹³⁰ The deputation seeks earth and water, the standard symbols of political submission, which Amyntas freely gives. Yet these symbols take on a new dimension during an elaborate banquet that tests Macedonian compliance, as the Persians say to Amyntas:

ξεῖνε Μακεδών, ἡμῖν νόμος ἐστὶ τοῖσι Πέρσῃσι, ἐπεὰν δεῖπνον προτιθώμεθα μέγα, τότε καὶ τὰς παλλακὰς καὶ τὰς κουριδίας γυναῖκας ἐσάγεσθαι παρέδρους. σύ νυν, ἐπεί περ προθύμως μὲν ἐδέξαο, μεγάλως δὲ ξεινίζεις, διδοῖς τε βασιλέϊ Δαρείῳ γῆν τε καὶ ὕδωρ, ἕπεο νόμῳ τῷ ἡμετέρῳ. εἶπε πρὸς ταῦτα Ἀμύντης· ὦ Πέρσαι, νόμος μὲν ἡμῖν γέ ἐστι οὐκ οὗτος, ἀλλὰ κεχωρίσθαι ἄνδρας γυναικῶν· ἐπείτε δὲ ὑμεῖς ἐόντες δεσπόται προσχρηίζετε τούτων, παρέσται ὑμῖν καὶ ταῦτα.

(5.18.2–3)

“Macedonian friend, we Persians have a nomos: whenever we put forward a large dinner, then we bring in our concubines and wives to sit alongside us. You now, since you have received us eagerly and entertained us lavishly and are giving earth and water to king Darius, follow our nomos.” And Amyntas said in response: “Persians, this is not our nomos, but to have men and women kept apart. But since you who are our masters request it, these things will be yours as well.”

Although differing nomoi are equally valid, imperial expansion undermines this.¹³¹ The logic of empire is here set in stark terms. The embassy, functioning metonymically as the Great King (δεσπόται), claims to enforce the nomos of Persia on the basis of its political supremacy.¹³² The natural consequent of earth and water is presented, therefore, as cultural subordination. Again, the Persians use the power of nomos, their own, to sanction unethical behavior among the Macedonians. Macedon’s loss of autonomy – in this case, with respect to traditional sympotic and sexual practices – suggests that in the context of its domination, Persian nomos is king of all.¹³³ Amyntas’ forced acceptance (ἀναγκαζόμενος) of foreign custom represents one reaction to Persian domination. Immediately after this submission, Amyntas’ son, Alexander, a “youth,” νέος (neos), “lacking experience of evils,” κακῶν ἀπαθής, presents an alternative one. Unable to endure the insult, he sends his father away and, through a theatrical ruse, massacres the embassy. In doing so, at least momentarily he reasserts the authority of Macedonian nomos.¹³⁴ Through a series of bribes and intermarriages, Alexander eventually reintegrates the Macedonians into the good favor of the Persians;¹³⁵ nonetheless, his rejection of the forced imposition of a foreign norm remains a powerful statement of resistance to cultural imperialism.¹³⁶ Amyntas and Alexander represent two opposing responses of a subject population to Persian cultural imperialism, without resolving the conflict.

Parallel to the ambiguous position of nomos for the subjects of Persia is the assessment of abstract justice.¹³⁷ In the course of the Persian invasion of mainland Greece, Xerxes engages in an extended dialogue with his “wise advisor,” Artabanus, on the brevity and brutishness of life, on the prospect of Persian success against Hellas, and the dangers presented by the sea and the land. Artabanus turns to the enlistment of the Ionians among the Persian forces, recounting their conquest by Cyrus and their close relationship to Athens, their fathers (τοὺς πατέρας). In his rhetorical push to gain Xerxes’ assent to leave them behind, Artabanus relies upon an argument based on justice and kinship:

ἢ γὰρ σφέας, ἢν ἕπωνται, δεῖ ἀδικωτάτους γίνεσθαι καταδουλουμένους τὴν μητρόπολιν, ἢ δικαιοτάτους συνελευθεροῦντας. ἀδικώτατοι μέν νυν γινόμενοι οὐδὲν κέρδος μέγα ἡμῖν προσβάλλουσι, δικαιότατοι δὲ γινόμενοι οἷοί τε δηλήσασθαι μεγάλως τὴν σὴν στρατιὴν γίνονται.

(7.51.2–3)

For, if they follow you, either they must become the most unjust of men by enslaving their mother city or the most just by joining in freeing it. Now by becoming the most unjust of men they effect no great gain for us, but by becoming the most just they can damage your army greatly.

At the battle of Salamis, the Ionians do prove themselves loyal, and presumably unjust, by warring against the Athenians. However, Artabanus’ speech identifies a key weakness in the Persian force and rightly presages the rhetorical thrust of Themistocles’ plea to the Ionians following the battle of Artemisium. Themistocles inscribes the stone faces in the region with words that correspond closely to Artabanus’: “Ionian men, you do not do what is just by waging a war against your fathers and enslaving Greece” (8.22.1: ἄνδρες Ἴωνες, οὐ ποιέετε δίκαια ἐπὶ τοὺς πατέρας στρατευόμενοι καὶ τὴν Ἑλλάδα καταδουλούμενοι). It is the perception of an Ionian revolt from Persia that leads Xerxes to end his naval campaign against Greece; his fears that the Ionians might side with the mainland Greeks and suggest the destruction of the bridges at the Hellespont, or that they themselves would do it, led to his retreat to Asia.¹³⁸ And as the Greek audience would well know, the revolt of the Ionians during the battle of Mycale decisively ended the Persian naval threat to Greece. Artabanus’ cultural fluency in Greek colonialism manifests in his awareness of the dual danger of allowing Ionia to march against her putative mother-city.¹³⁹

Xerxes responds to Artabanus’ warning in kind, stressing the justice of the Ionians, but recalls the historical lesson of Scythia. As has already been narrated twice, Darius’ disastrous campaign only escaped total annihilation because of the intervention of the Ionian tyrants. Xerxes offers the tyrants’ decisive support of Persia in this crucial moment as an example of Ionia’s fidelity to the imperial power. Importantly, he identifies obedience as their justice, “they gave us justice and loyalty and nothing at all thankless” (7.52.1: οἳ δὲ δικαιοσύνην καὶ πιστότητα ἐνέδωκαν, ἄχαρι δὲ οὐδέν). By analogy, the Great King suggests that the Persians now have nothing to fear from the Ionians due to this test of their caliber. Appropriately, Xerxes reads “Ionian tyrants” as “the Ionians,” displaying an inability to discern the difference between the ruler and his subjects.¹⁴⁰ Ionian justice, on this reading, is precisely their rejection of the Athenian claim in favor of Persia.¹⁴¹

As has often been noted, Herodotus creates alternative narratives that allow the reader to choose a variant; similarly, he presents alternative positions on justice in relation to imperialism.¹⁴² In crafting the opposing focalizations, which in fact simply speak past one another, the text reinforces the destabilized referents for terms such as dikaiosyne and nomos. Where imperialism is involved a confusion of values can occur through the manipulation of language.

Nomos and Imperialism

As I have argued above, the historical narrative engages with the ethical impact of relativism and its potential for destabilizing popular morality from nomos and, at times, dike. By juxtaposing popular tradition and revisionary values prompted by the Persian ruler and the Persian imperial project, the text dramatizes this philosophical problem as a historical one with its roots in domination, both internal and external to Persian rule. These two narrative strands – tyrannical and imperial – intersect at a key moment prior to Xerxes’ invasion, in the council called to introduce the campaign against Greece.

We are informed that from the start of his reign Xerxes was not at all eager to move against Greece and that the decision to invade was made after a long series of prods from interested parties.¹⁴³ A catalog of aristocrats lend their persuasive force, beginning and ending with Xerxes’ cousin Mardonius, who was himself motivated by a private desire to have Greece as a satrapy. Mardonius argues for the invasion on the grounds of vengeance owed to the Athenians and Eretrians for their unjust participation in the Ionian Revolt, as well as on the basis of the bounty of the Greek mainland; the Aleuadae, kings of Thessaly, come to offer their assistance on the ground; the exiled Peisistratids too persuade Xerxes with promises of support and information; and an Athenian oracle-monger, Onomacritus, recites select oracles of Musaeus favorable to a Persian invasion. The unified front of these speeches eventually works upon Xerxes, and he assents to the offensive. The narrative stresses that the Great King is persuaded, making him the passive recipient of the rhetorical tactics of court politics, first by Mardonius, χρόνῳ δὲ κατεργάσατό τε καὶ ἀνέπεισε Ξέρξην ὥστε ποιέειν ταῦτα. συνέλαβε γὰρ καὶ ἄλλα οἱ σύμμαχα γενόμενα ἐς τὸ πείθεσθαι Ξέρξην (7.6.1: “in time he prevailed on and convinced Xerxes to do these things. For other allies combined with him to persuade Xerxes”) and then by the intervention of the foreigners Mardonius had engineered to be present, ὡς δὲ ἀνεγνώσθη Ξέρξης στρατεύεσθαι ἐπὶ τὴν Ἑλλάδα (7.7: “so Xerxes was convinced to war against Greece”). That Xerxes is presented as a passive figure is confirmed by the later words of his wise advisor, Artabanus, who likens the king’s decision to attack Greece to the behavior of the sea: calm by its own nature but whipped into frenzy by the winds.¹⁴⁴ Analogously, the company of interested parties keeps Xerxes from his initial reluctance.

Following his decision to invade, Xerxes holds a council to set out his plans for moving against Greece and, allegedly, to learn the opinion of his fellow Persian elites. The Council Scene is a meticulously articulated tableau. It elaborates the aetiology of the Greco-Persian Wars and as such unfolds metonymically to reflect upon the question driving the Histories as a whole. Xerxes’ speech begins not with strategy but with his motivation for moving against the Hellenes,

ἄνδρες Πέρσαι, οὔτ᾽ αὐτὸς κατηγήσομαι νόμον τόνδε ἐν ὑμῖν τιθείς, παραδεξάμενός τε αὐτῷ χρήσομαι. ὡς γὰρ ἐγὼ πυνθάνομαι τῶν πρεσβυτέρων, οὐδαμά κω ἠτρεμίσαμεν, ἐπείτε παρελάβομεν τὴν ἡγεμονίην τήνδε παρὰ Μήδων, Κύρου κατελόντος Ἀστυάγεα· ἀλλὰ θεός τε οὕτω ἄγει καὶ αὐτοῖσι ἡμῖν πολλὰ ἐπέπουσι συμφέρεται ἐπὶ τὸ ἄμεινον.

(7.8.α1)

Men of Persia, I do not lead the way in establishing this nomos among you – but having inherited it, I will make use of it. For, as I understand from our elders, up to the present we have not at all kept still since we took this hegemony from the Medes, when Cyrus dethroned Astyages. But a god leads in this way and when we attend to many things it turns out for the better.

The standard interpretation sees Xerxes as rightly “reading” Persian history as it preceded him. So, according to Joseph Skinner, “To explain the rise of Persia it is necessary to understand Persian manners and customs – of which the overarching nomos of expansion from which Xerxes was ultimately unable to escape is arguably the most important.”¹⁴⁵ From this perspective, Xerxes is not inventing a nomos but describing an existing one within Persia.¹⁴⁶ Similarly, Emily Baragwanath emphasizes the accuracy of Xerxes’ assessment in this passage, “the king lays striking emphasis on his respect for nomos and plays down the relevance of his personal views (7.8α.1). Xerxes emerges not as a victim of personal lusts, but as a figure whose decisions are influenced above all by his understanding of the past.”¹⁴⁷ His self-presentation certainly does suggest this reading and is reinforced by his succeeding statement that immediately upon inheriting the throne he began to consider how not to fall short of his ancestors (7.8.α2).¹⁴⁸ Yet, interpreting Xerxes as a reliable histor invites comparison with what he narrates, and it is immediately clear that his motivation to invade is much more complex than he reveals.¹⁴⁹ His passivity in arriving at this resolution is muted; instead, the nomos of expansion and his emphasis on his historical understanding present the king as bound to conquer Greece by tradition.¹⁵⁰ Rather than identifying Xerxes as one compelled by historical sensibility to war, the narrative was careful to stress the effortful machinery of the Persian court. Notably, none of their arguments in favor of the offensive brought nomos to bear on the question of invasion; Xerxes appears to revise his motivation in stride and to translate the chorus of his confidantes into the more rhetorically expedient nomos.

It might be objected that Xerxes’ reluctance about the choice to invade was specific to Greece and not a pause or a check on expansionism itself. Recall, however, that Xerxes inherits two planned campaigns from his father, Darius. One against Egypt, which had only recently revolted, and another against Greece, in response to Athens’ attack on Sardis (7.1–7.2.1). It is the expectation of a two-pronged invasion by Darius that leads to the excursus on his selection of Xerxes as successor to the throne. When the expectation of invasions is frustrated by Darius’ death, Xerxes is against expansionism into Greece and for the reintegration of Egypt (7.5.5), which is a restoration of territory rather than an extension of it. The initial parallelism of the assaults on Greece and Egypt becomes even weaker in the narration of Xerxes’ campaign against Egypt, which is reduced to a single circumstantial participle after the fact, “now after subjecting them” (7.7: τούτους μέν νυν καταστρεψάμενος). The subsequent confrontation between Xerxes and Artabanus on whether or not to march against the Greeks, after Xerxes has been convinced to do so, turns on a polar opposition of Persian motion versus rest.¹⁵¹ In his address to the Persians, Xerxes highlights Persia’s unwillingness to keep still (7.8.α1: οὐδαμά κω ἠτρεμίσαμεν) and states that the god “leads” (ἄγει) their marches. The distinction between expansionism into Greece and the re-subjugation of Egypt is made clear in what follows, in Xerxes’ interpretation of his offensive against Greece as his first act of adding power to the Persian Empire. The motif of motion versus rest continues in Artabanus’ opposition of destructive haste to constructive waiting (7.10.ζ). It is notable that Xerxes responds with the astonishing pronouncement that “if we will keep quiet, they (i.e., the Greeks) will not” (7.11.2: εἰ ἡμεῖς ἡσυχίην ἄξομεν, ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἐκεῖνοι). When the Great King has been convinced of the folly of his errand by Artabanus, his order to the Persians is to “be at rest” (7.13.3: ἥσυχοι ἔστε). Finally, as noted earlier, the analogy that Artabanus uses to describe the conduct of Xerxes refers to him as a naturally calm sea, disturbed by winds (7.16.α1). The thread uniting the march into Greece with expansionism is importantly distinct, then, from Xerxes’ punitive expedition back into Egypt. Once the project of invasion into Greece has been abandoned, it is expansionism itself that is checked, given the stress on Persian motionlessness, quiet, and rest. This harks back to Cyrus’ ill-fated invasion of the Massagetes. Tomyris, its queen, bids Cyrus to cease his “haste” in the marked polyptoton, παῦσαι σπεύδων τὰ σπεύδεις (1.206.1), while recognizing that he prefers anything to “rest” (1.206.2: ἀλλὰ πάντως μᾶλλον ἢ δι᾽ ἡσυχίης).

How, then, are we to interpret Xerxes’ oratorical strategy in his first speech? First, nomos bound to imperialism elides considerations of popular justice and injustice. Indeed, Xerxes treats vengeance against Athens and Eretria as almost an afterthought and immediately subsumes the two into a broader plan to attack Greece.¹⁵² Appropriately for these ballooning ambitions, he envisions enslaving the guilty as well as the guiltless, οὕτω οἵ τε ἡμῖν αἴτιοι ἕξουσι δούλιον ζυγὸν οἵ τε ἀναίτιοι (7.8.γ3: “so both the guilty and guiltless will bear a yoke of enslavement”), in a turn of phrase that rivals Cambyses in its departure from popular morality.¹⁵³ Indeed, a passage that commentators often juxtapose with Xerxes’ appeal to nomos is the Athenian imperial bid for the necessity of physis (ὑπὸ φύσεως ἀναγκαίας) as the motive force for their attack against the Melians.¹⁵⁴ Thucydides’ Athenians infamously assert their independence from popular morality by stating that their imperialist impulse (ἂν κρατῇ, ἄρχειν) is justified by nomos:

καὶ ἡμεῖς οὔτε θέντες τὸν νόμον οὔτε κειμένῳ πρῶτοι χρησάμενοι, ὄντα δὲ παραλαβόντες καὶ ἐσόμενον ἐς αἰεὶ καταλείψοντες χρώμεθα αὐτῷ, εἰδότες καὶ ὑμᾶς ἂν καὶ ἄλλους ἐν τῇ αὐτῇ δυνάμει ἡμῖν γενομένους δρῶντας ἂν ταὐτό.

(5.105.2)

We neither established this nomos nor are we the first to use it once established; we received it already in existence and use it and will leave it after us for all time. We know that you and others coming into our same power would do the same.

The Athenians blur the distinction between nomos and physis, leading to their self-satisfied conclusion that imperialism is a nomos that nature pursues. Their calculated analysis reveals the extent to which the Athenians are interested in justifying their popularly immoral behavior as part of a universal “law” of the strong ruling the weak. It is the long influence of imperialism on historical action that underwrites this ethical position. Xerxes’ strategy in explaining his advance on the Greek mainland is not dissimilar in its appeal to nomos; he too denies establishing the nomos of imperialism (7.8.α1: οὔτ’ … νόμον τόνδε … τιθεὶς) but states that he has received it and will use it (χρήσομαι).¹⁵⁵ Xerxes looks to the more limited sphere of Persian history in order to justify his actions, beginning with the succession (παρελάβομεν) of empire from Astyages to Cyrus. The Athenians gesture to a much more expansive inheritance (παραλαβόντες) in the past, one that will continue into the future. Unlike the Athenians in the Melian Dialogue, however, the challenge that a nomos of expansionism poses to normative Persian social values is rarely emphasized. Perhaps this is because Xerxes rightly identifies a historical reality in Persia – they are seldom at rest (7.8.1: οὐδαμά κω ἠτρεμίσαμεν).¹⁵⁶ But so too do the Athenians rightly observe that the strong dominate the weak. While these are historical facts, glossing nomos as their motive force remains a provocative position, and one that departs from popular morality in Persia and in Athens.¹⁵⁷

Xerxes’ position identifies nomos as the impetus of the ruler, even though elsewhere in the narrative it is the mandate of a given society. Note also the resistance of the Persians to the campaign immediately following the speeches of Xerxes and Mardonius, “All the rest of the Persians were silent and did not dare to raise a judgment opposed to the one set before them” (7.10.1). Their stifled desire to protest the campaign becomes a bow of joy after Xerxes reverses his position and orders the Persians to be quiet (7.13.3). Persia’s internal resistance to the offensive suggests that this nomos is not socially constituted but imposed. Its historical merit is also compromised in an earlier episode, when Darius decides to go to war with Greece not from a compulsory divine nomos but from a desire to keep the Persians from inciting a revolution against him. Atossa motivates him to wage war against Greece by warning him of potential Persian revolution if the people remain quiet (3.134.2).

An additional difficulty for Xerxes’ reading of Persian imperial history as nomos is its departure from popular morality in Persia, where the subjugation of innocents was not a rhetorical argument for expansionism.¹⁵⁸ This is equally true of the Persian logioi whose voices initially answer the histor’s question on the cause of the Greco-Persian Wars: according to them, the Greeks were responsible for the invasion because of injustices extending from the Trojan War; this pretext is neglected entirely by Xerxes.¹⁵⁹ Both Xerxes and Mardonius draw attention to the blamelessness of those to be conquered or already under Persian rule (7.8.γ3, 7.9.2). While Xerxes does maintain that the Athenians will merit their destruction, this is subordinate to his overweening sentiment of bringing all of Greece to heel and extending the boundaries of his empire to meet with those of Zeus.¹⁶⁰

If we juxtapose the language of the king with that of his wise advisor, Artabanus, an alternative response to endemic Persian expansion emerges.¹⁶¹ Artabanus plays internal historian, recounting his experiences during the disastrous invasion of Scythia undertaken by Darius and the failed mission of Datis and Artaphrenes into Attica.¹⁶² On his reading of Persian history, the Scythians are not as powerful as the Greeks, and, a fortiori, Xerxes’ attack on them could be proportionally more damaging for Persia.¹⁶³ As in Xerxes’ speech, a theological argument follows this historical one, but rather than supporting a nomos of expansion as Xerxes had declared, the divine instead acts as a check upon it, striking down disproportionately great creatures (7.10.ε). In his ensuing attack on the half-truths and outright distortions of Mardonius, Artabanus re-translates the nomos of expansionism back into the self-interestedness of the Persian court. These two final points are stressed again in the scene that immediately follows, after Xerxes comes to agree with the advice of Artabanus. Artabanus again chides Xerxes for teaching his soul to be appetitive (7.16.α2: διδάσκειν τὴν ψυχὴν πλέον τι δίζησθαι αἰεὶ ἔχειν τοῦ παρεόντος: “to teach your soul to seek ever more than what it has at present”) by entertaining the audiences of vicious men, who prevent him from using his true physis (7.16.α1).¹⁶⁴ This is a rare case in which Herodotus hints at the opposition of nomos and physis.¹⁶⁵ Whereas certain contemporary philosophers were suggesting that nomos operated as a force against the extremism of human physis, Herodotus reverses this emphasis: in Artabanus’ speech to Xerxes after the council he compares the king’s physis to the sea, the most useful of all things when not disturbed by the force of the disruptive winds. So, instead of naturalizing the imperial project as an obvious outcome of nature, Artabanus qua wise advisor treats imperialism as a corruption of the soul, in an idiosyncratic anticipation of Platonic ethics.

Artabanus’ reading of Persian history and the divine forces is successful for the moment. After initially rejecting Artabanus’ speech, Xerxes eventually comes to agree with it and bids the Persians to remain quiet. This turn of events must force a realignment of the reading of Xerxes’ nomos of imperialism. Herodotus’ judgment that nomos is king of all points to its near-gravitational force on the society that practices it. Yet here Xerxes immediately abandons his newly minted Persian nomos in favor of quietism, at least until he is impelled to war by the divine dream.

I should digress at this point to examine an important and widespread assertion, that the dream itself represents another instantiation of nomos, an interpretation that is grounded in Xerxes’ identification of this tradition as aided by the divine.¹⁶⁶ There is no evidence in the Histories for divine dreams as connected to nomos; instead, nomos is almost exclusively tied to the sphere of humans.¹⁶⁷ Recall that on Xerxes’ account, a divinity leads the Persians on and with its aid, “it turns out for the better,” συμφέρεται ἐπὶ τὸ ἄμεινον (7.8.α1). The results of the Persian invasion – not to mention prior Persian history – hardly encourage identifying the Great King as correct in his assessment of the position of the divine with regard to Persia’s expansion. Much more compelling is interpreting the dream not as a concrete manifestation of the divine nomos that drives Persia to battle but rather in the context of Artabanus’ characterization of the divine when faced with an individual who “thinks big”: “Do you see how the god blasts those creatures who are over the top and does not allow them to make a display of themselves, but small creatures do not provoke him … for the god does not allow any other than himself to think big” (7.10.ε: ὁρᾷς τὰ ὑπερέχοντα ζῷα ὡς κεραυνοῖ ὁ θεὸς οὐδὲ ἐᾷ φαντάζεσθαι, τὰ δὲ σμικρὰ οὐδέν μιν κνίζει … οὐ γὰρ ἐᾷ φρονέειν μέγα ὁ θεὸς ἄλλον ἢ ἑωυτόν). Xerxes’ speech to the Persians well exemplifies Chris Pelling’s point that the tyrant shows an inability to distinguish the boundary between the human and the divine.¹⁶⁸ Given the deceptive nature of the dream and its unwillingness to bring victory to the Persians, it is preferable to see the dream as connected to Artabanus’ vision of the divine, who serve to check what is excessive, even in speech.¹⁶⁹ In an instance of narrative irony, it is Artabanus who subsequently misinterprets the divine dream in spite of his evident understanding of the workings of it. First, he proposes that the dream arose from Xerxes’ preoccupation with the muster; when convinced of its divine origin, Artabanus believes it evidence of the coming destruction of Greece rather than Persia (7.18.3).

If the deceptive dream is not to be connected to the nomos led by the divine that Xerxes appealed to, the credibility of Xerxes’ motivation as nomos is further compromised. Xerxes’ appeal to nomos is not in fact stirred by his reading of Persian history but instead is a rhetorical strategy aimed at justifying his large-scale offensive as a defensible one, in line with the tendency of Persian monarchy to regard the king’s will as nomos, as in the case of Cambyses.¹⁷⁰ In glossing nomos as a desire for more, Xerxes subtly recodes ethical values, in a further dramatization of the frayed relationship of nomos to justice in the context of Persian despotism and imperialism.

By crafting the forward momentum of the Persians as nomos, Xerxes displays a despotic tendency to unravel traditional concepts of morality in favor of his own personal legality, much as we saw Pheidippides do in the Clouds. Additionally, Herodotus’ attention to the wisdom and practical experience of Artabanus in opposition to the youthful recklessness of Xerxes recreates the topos of the young sophos destabilizing nomos when confronted with a senior figure who acts as a representative of tradition. Xerxes’ rationalization of his original plan to invade Greece is couched in generational terms in the arresting metaphor “my youthful spirit bubbled over” (7.13.2: ἡ νεότης ἐπέζεσε). Youth forms the basis of Artabanus’ critique of Xerxes (7.18.2). It led to Xerxes’ abusive attack against Artabanus, who is explicitly termed his “elder” (ἐς ἄνδρα πρεσβύτερον).¹⁷¹ This chimes closely with a fragment that may belong to Euripides’ Andromache, in which a speaker declares that “youth exalted me, and a boldness more than good sense” (TrGF F 134a Kannicht: νεότης μ’ ἐπῆρε καὶ θράσος τοῦ νοῦ πλέον).¹⁷² Even more noteworthy is how Xerxes’ justification puts him in dialogue with the Clouds, where it is the young (οἱ νέοι) who are encouraged to sharpen their tongues (1058–9) and learn the Worse Argument. Of course, when the contest over parental-beating arises between Strepsiades and Pheidippides, it too is couched in generational terms of young versus old (1391–2, 1418–19). If it is correct to view Xerxes’ characterization in these terms, Herodotus’ emplotment of the motivation of the Greco-Persian Wars engages with this philosophical debate and uses it to initiate the Persian war machine’s momentum against Greece. The momentary success of Artabanus in dissuading Xerxes from his campaign, will, of course, be entirely undone by the actions of the deceptive dream sent to both, rebooting the doomed war and obviating the need for nomos as a pretext.

Conclusion

A progressive reading of the ethnographies within the Histories establishes an interpretative framework that translates the respect one’s own society gives to its traditional norms into a respect for those of other peoples, supporting a philosophy of cultural relativism. Cultural relativism holds that all societies enjoy their own practices, with no Archimedean viewpoint from which to judge these practices in moral terms. Further, it cultivates a hermeneutic of “reading” culture from the perspective of the people who constitute it and to make sense of difference through the context of enculturation. Yet, cultural relativism’s recognition of the arbitrary nature of tradition has the potential to threaten the social order through the introduction of revisionary nomoi. This consequence is dramatized in Aristophanes’ Clouds, in contemporaneous tragedy, and in the fragments of the Presocratics who stressed the arbitrariness of nomos in contradistinction to the fixity and inevitability of physis. In the Histories, the problem of revisionary nomoi concentrates around the figure of the despot and the imperialist drive, and this complicates a reading of the work as unilaterally supportive of nomos. The platitude “Nomos is king” fails to capture the pressure put on tradition by way of the tyrannical individual or imperial nomos. By highlighting the instances in the Histories in which nomos is a contested concept, one that can be used as a rhetorical ploy to justify what is popularly unjust, it is possible to place Herodotus’ text in a community of thinkers exploring the power of conventional versus subversive ethics. The individual ruler or the empire’s creation of its own ethics is contrasted with the portrait of custom, tradition, and law as a popularly sanctioned phenomenon.

The prominence of relativism in the Histories carries implications for our understanding of Herodotus’ historical project. First, it shows that Herodotus’ interrogation uses ethnographic case studies and the rise of the Persian Empire to demonstrate the validity of cultural relativism and the deleterious effects of subjectivism. As a reminder, cultural relativism highlights the diversity of norms, rejects any absolute perspective from which to view these norms, and treats them as having validity for the society in which they obtain. Subjectivism, meanwhile, treats the individual as the measure for human behavior, rather than the culture. The ethical questions raised by the latter phenomenon are highly politicized; the Persian Empire and the Great King are potent illustrations of the perversion of custom and law. This is not to suggest that Herodotus emerges as an unyielding critic of Persia. His depiction of the Persians avoids such gross caricature. Next, the debate on relativism is of real consequence for our understanding of the wider aims of the Histories – the challenge to nomos plays a role in the key causal moment in the narrative – Xerxes’ war council. In glossing the motive force of Persia’s expansion as nomos, Herodotus’ Xerxes embodies the youthful and subversive sophos familiar from comedy and tragedy and from previous Persian monarchs in the Histories, intent upon disturbing popular morality with nomos as a screen. This paradigm situates Herodotus alongside the sophistic and Socratic thinkers in the fifth century for whom the variability of cultural norms could foster dangerously appetitive individuals. This is precisely the language that Artabanus uses in retrospectively depicting the Council: he describes his own speech as a failed attempt to instruct Xerxes “how evil it is to teach the soul always to seek more” (7.16.α2), a reading of Xerxes that implicitly rejects treating his nomos as an accurate reflection of Persia and instead repositions it as the ethics of a corrupted individual.

Interpreting Herodotus among Presocratic thinkers whose investigations focused upon questions of ethical importance moves us well beyond the platitude of Herodotus as a philosophical thinker in terms of his empiricism. Much as the narrator vies with the natural scientists in his discussion of the behavior of the Nile, so too he reveals a fluency with the more abstract questions of the New Learning from this period. The Histories engages profoundly with the philosophy of cultural relativism and nomos and, in the context of Persian hegemony, explores the fraying of nomos as an index of a society’s own justice. In this way, Herodotus goes beyond identifying nomos as a cultural marker particular to a given people to develop the concept into a complex, plastic one with the capacity both to structure and unravel human society.